Category Archives: Public policy

New IPCC economic models

An arti­cle from Forbes Mag­a­zine on the IPCC’s lat­est “socio-economic mod­el­ling” of emis­sion and growth sce­nar­ios has attracted a lot of atten­tion because it claims the IPCC now shows that… The high­est eco­nomic growth model leads to the low­est level of emis­sions con­sid­ered. Less eco­nomic growth leads to higher emis­sions. Extract from Forbes But the authors …

August 12, 2011 – 7:52 am | By pwg | Posted in Public policy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Smoking and climate change

Mal­colm Turn­bull, in a recent speech invented a para­ble about a fool­hardy smoker to illus­trate his claim that con­test­ing the views of the “best sci­en­tists” on man-made climate-change is an “attack on sci­ence”. But does this para­ble make sense? Should we con­sider the the claimed “con­sen­sus” of science-policy bod­ies on dan­ger­ous global warm­ing to be …

July 26, 2011 – 4:54 pm | By pwg | Posted in Ideas, Public policy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Treasury’s advocacy of a CO2 tax

One thing on which I agree with Julia Gillard is the poor qual­ity of many jour­nal­ists’ analy­sis of her pro­pos­als. But when you cram jour­nal­ists with non­sense, you must expect some of them to regur­gi­tate it from time to time. “In the­ory, this is an inge­nious model for adapt­ing our fos­sil fuel econ­omy to global cli­mate …

July 16, 2011 – 3:03 pm | By pwg | Posted in Public policy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Hesitate to regulate global exchange

Alan Greenspan iden­ti­fies the inevitable igno­rance of reg­u­la­tors. Recall Gary Banks’ advice to con­sider all pub­lic poli­cies as ‘exper­i­ments’. “[The United States’ 2010 “Dodd-Frank” finan­cial reg­u­la­tion law] fails to cap­ture the degree of global inter­con­nect­ed­ness of recent decades which has not been sub­stan­tially altered by the cri­sis of 2008. The act may cre­ate the largest …

March 31, 2011 – 8:31 am | By pwg | Posted in Public policy | Comments (0)